Because losing one indelible artist last Friday apparently wasn't enough, the cosmos has now claimed illustrator and author Maurice Sendak. The creator of Where the Wild Things Are reportedly suffered a stroke last Friday and died early today at a hospital in Danbury, Conn. He was 83.
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Editor's note: The following piece, originally published by the author at Movie City News, was written after the New York premiere of the Beastie Boys' concert film Awesome; I Fuckin' Shot That! in 2006. The project was one of many films and videos made by the Beasties' late Adam Yauch under his directorial nom de plume Nathanial Hörnblowér; Movieline today republishes the piece in remembrance. — STV
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Tragic, shocking news out of New York just now: Adam Yauch — a.k.a. MCA, one-third of rap legends the Beastie Boys, influential filmmaker and music-video director, and founder of independent-film distributor Oscilloscope Laboratories — has died following his long battle with cancer. He was 47.
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Sad news out of Manhattan: Amos Vogel, whose championing of foreign and independent film changed the direction of modern cinema over the last half-century, has passed away. He was 91. Vogel's Cinema 16 events, introduced in 1947, battled censors and opened viewers' eyes to the likes of Roman Polanski, Yasujirō Ozu, Robert Bresson, John Cassavetes and scores of other auteurs — in some cases before the word "auteur" meant anything. He also co-founded the New York Film Festival, which this year celebrates its 50th anniversary as the city's leading light of movie culture.
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Radio and TV host/personality/entrepreneur Dick Clark has died at the age of 82, reports the AP. The "American Bandstand"/"New Year's Rockin' Eve" fixture had suffered a heart attack following an outpatient procedure in Santa Monica. Over the course of his six-decade career Clark also produced awards shows including the American Music Awards (which he founded), the Emmy Awards, and the Golden Globes; he even dabbled in film, writing and starring in the 1968 crime drama Killers Three.
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"Ralph McQuarrie was the first person I hired to help me envision Star Wars. His genial contribution, in the form of unequaled production paintings, propelled and inspired all of the cast and crew of the original Star Wars trilogy. When words could not convey my ideas, I could always point to one of Ralph’s fabulous illustrations and say, 'Do it like this.'" [via WSJ]
Davy Jones, once named by Yahoo as the number 1 teen idol of all time, passed away at the age of 66 after suffering a heart attack. As a member of the Beatles-inspired musical group The Monkees, created for their eponymous television show in 1966, Jones rose to fame alongside bandmates Peter Tork, Mickey Dolenz, and Michael Nesmith and subsequently embarked on a successful solo musical career of his own; let's remember Jones with a look back at The Monkees, Jones' acting career, and the group's 1968 psychedelic cult film, Head.
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We were just talking about Scenes From a Marriage, too: The Swedish actor-writer-director Erland Josephson has died following a protracted battle with Parkinson's Disease. He was 88. Josephson came to prominence as a friend, theater colleague and eventual ensemble player for the great Ingmar Bergman, finally breaking into the leading-man ranks in the filmmaker's seminal relationship epic Scenes before eventually diversifying with roles in films by Peter Greenaway (Prospero's Books), Philip Kaufman (The Unbearable Light of Being) and, most indelibly, Andrei Tarkovsky, who cast Josephson in his 1986 masterpiece The Sacrifice. Very sad. R.I.P. [NYT]
Despite having acted in only a handful of movies before her death on Saturday at the age of 48, Whitney Houston left a lasting legacy with the few film projects she did release during her reign as arguably the best-known female pop singer of her generation. 1995's Waiting to Exhale earned her a NAACP Image Award nomination, and 1996's The Preacher's Wife won her the award (and made her the highest-earning African American actress in Hollywood at the time); this year's Sparkle was set to be Houston's comeback after a well-documented and public period of substance abuse and personal decline. But no film is as indelibly linked to Houston's legacy as her debut in 1992's The Bodyguard, and the record-breaking soundtrack it spawned.
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Stage and film veteran Ben Gazzara, whose career spanned five decades and included a stint directing television, has died at age 81 in New York. According to The New York Times, Gazzara succumbed to pancreatic cancer today in Manhattan, where he lived. Let's bid a fond farewell to the Emmy-winning, Golden Globes-nominated Gazzara by remembering some of his most indelible work.
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This is just terrible, terrible news: Former United Artists boss, October Films cofounder and recent appointee as S.F. Film Society executive director Bingham Ray has passed away following a series of strokes suffered while attending the Sundance Film Festival -- an event from which his name and influence have been inseparable for more than two decades. He was 57.
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The best-known Hollywood swordsman this side of Warren Beatty passed away on New Year's Day: Bob Anderson, an Olympic fencer who once wounded Errol Flynn on set and whose subsequent swordfight choreography spanned 60 years and such franchises as Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings and the James Bond series, is dead at the age of 89. Wind up your day rewatching a few of his finest battles.
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